Over the past eighty years, the famous Nazi expedition to the Himalayas in 1938-1939 has acquired an incredible number of legends, speculation and rumors.
It was said that the Germans found traces of an alien civilization in Lhasa and even personally talked with aliens, who conveyed a message to them for the Fuhrer. It was rumored that travelers brought Himmler from Tibet an elixir of immortality: in May 1945, he drank it, and everyone decided that he was poisoned; in fact, he did not die, but fled - either to South America, or to another planet.
In 2009, the "Buddha from Space" or "Iron Man" became famous - a 25-centimeter 10-kilogram statuette of Buddha, decorated with a swastika and carved from a meteorite that fell to Earth 10 thousand years ago. According to legend, the Nazis brought her from Tibet.
A recent examination showed, however, that although the statuette was indeed made of a meteorite, most likely no one brought it from Lhasa. It's just that a European master, having carved it out for the fascist mystics, provided it with a suitable legend.
Well, the crown of all - the story of the crystal skull, which inspired Spielberg to create "Indiana Jones". Allegedly, in time immemorial, the Maya people created thirteen such skulls and, by some unknown means, sent them around the world. One of them was kidnapped by the Germans in Tibet and brought as a gift to Himmler. The skull still exists today. True, in 2012 it was dropped during filming and a piece of crystal was chipped off. The mystics of the whole Earth decided that now the end of the world would surely come, allegedly predicted in the Mayan calendar. However, December 2012 passed without shocks. The apocalypse never came.
What actually was the expedition of the Nazis to Tibet and did they manage to find what they were looking for?
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Training
The basis for future rumors and legends was created by the chief of the SS Heinrich Himmler. He had a weakness for all kinds of exotic theories. For example, together with Hitler, he believed in the concept of "world ice" invented by Hans Herbiger. It was a slim, beautiful and completely fantastic concept that Herbiger, by his own admission, saw in a dream. According to his idea, ice is one of the primary elements of nature. Planets, satellites, and ether were created from it. The ancestors of the Aryans, the Nordic superhumans, were born in the eternal snows. The ice gave them strength and purity. But at some point, the Moon (also made of ice) crashed into the Earth. Our planet has warmed up sharply, the ice has melted, and the true Aryans were able to survive only in the Himalayas. By adapting Herbiger's theory to their racial fantasies,the Nazis declared the theory of world ice a truly Aryan alternative to the "Jewish theory of relativity." Well, how could you not look for its confirmation in Tibet?
Another theory that captivated Himmler belonged to Hermann Virt. According to his concept, the world was created by two opposite protoraces: the Hyperboreans, who came from the north, and the people from the south, who inhabited the prototype of Gondwana. It turned out that the German burghers were the descendants of the highly spiritual Nordic Hyperboreans. Well, all sorts of Jews, gypsies and blacks came from Gondwana, for which they were subject to destruction. Himmler, who considered Christianity to be "Jewish inventions," decided to plant this wonderful concept in Germany instead of the traditional religion. Cult artifacts testifying to the existence of the Nordic super race were also supposed to be brought from Tibet.
Therefore, as soon as Himmler found out that the famous zoologist, ornithologist and hunter Ernst Schaefer was looking for sponsors in the USA for his expedition to Tibet, he urgently summoned him to Germany. We must give Schaefer his due - he objected to the all-powerful SS chief. A serious scientist did not smile to look for traces of blond beasts and their magical artifacts in the Himalayas. But Himmler was relentless. Generous support for the expedition (about 130 thousand Reichsmarks) was issued only on his terms. In the end, Schaefer gave up. He agreed to recruit an expedition from the SS, especially since he himself was a member of the SS since 1933. “I was attracted by the career opportunities that opened up,” he explained later.
Before leaving, Schaefer even met with Himmler's favorite Karl Maria Willigut. This former colonel, who spent many years in a mental hospital, considered himself an incarnation of the German god Thor. Especially for Schaefer, he delivered a slurred sermon: the listener decided that the modern Thor was deeply addicted to opium.
Booze with llamas
The year-long journey of Schaefer and his team through British India and the Himalayas proceeded with numerous delays. Instead of exciting adventures, the expedition faced death boredom. To unwind, the SS men hunted literally everything that moved. The most famous hunter was Schaefer himself. He became the first European to track down and kill a panda during his travels in China. The comrades were flattered to hunt under his command. Upon returning to their homeland, they donated 3,500 dried bird corpses, 2,000 bird eggs, 400 skulls and animal skeletons, as well as several thousand butterflies and other insects to the Berlin Museum of Natural History.
The features of the Nazi hunt were quite recognizable. From the food they had, according to the recollections of the participant, there was "noodles, noodles and nothing but noodles." They consoled themselves with a drink - Prussian schnapps. He walked especially well at an altitude of five thousand meters in the Himalayas, where the expedition was stuck in a hopeless wait for a pass to Tibet.
The fact is that in 1938 Tibet remained a closed state. Not a single foreigner was allowed into Lhasa - not even the British, who took Tibet by storm in 1903. The Germans were saved only by Schaefer's charm. An official from Tibet came to visit the expedition. Schaefer invited him to his yak-skin tent, gave him a good treat, presented him with cookies, rubber boots and an air mattress. And within a few weeks, the Germans were the first in the world to receive a written pass to the forbidden state, issued to Schaefer as an "expert in a hundred sciences."
On December 22, 1938, the Germans crossed the Tibetan border. Two days later, they put up a Christmas tree and celebrated Christmas. And right after the New Year we entered the sacred capital of Tibet - Lhasa. It was minus 35. All contacts with Tibetan lamas turned into a series of banquets and parties. "The beer flowed like a river, and the gramophone played German songs," writes a modern historian. The inhabitants of the holy city learned how to say "drink to the dregs" in German. And the panicked Germans began to measure the skulls of local residents, making sure with laughter that these short, dark-haired people had nothing in common with the true Aryans. Himmler's planned "meeting of the western and eastern swastika" turned into a drunken brawl.
However, drinking with lamas brought unexpected results. The fact is that in the second half of the 30s the German leadership had not yet decided who it would fight with. One of the plans was to invade British India with the support of the Soviets, deprive the British of their most valuable colony, and then finish them off on the island. This idea could be realized only with the help of Tibet.
Schaefer's charm and rivers of beer ensured success: he secured a promise of help from the lamas. Radreng Rinpoche, the ruler of Tibet, wrote a message to "His Grace Mr. Hitler" and sent him gifts - a Tibetan Mastiff, a gold coin and the robe of the Dalai Lama. In August 1939, the expedition returned to Germany.
results
The mystics subsequently reasoned simply. Since the Nazis classified the results of the Tibetan expedition, it means that there was something mysterious and important in them.
However, the secrecy was easy to explain. Schaefer's successful intelligence activities could not be shone, so they did not disclose the secret agreement with the leadership of Tibet. The rest of the expedition was a failure. Not a trace of the Hyperboreans was found in Tibet. The locals - more than 400 skulls were measured - looked like a typical “inferior race”. The theory of "global ice" collapsed - as did the concept of "racial purity."
The Tibetan expedition repeated the fate of the numerous expeditions that were equipped by the Nazi elite. Scientists - both serious figures and charlatans - used them as an opportunity to earn extra money and become famous. The Nazis hoped that expeditions would confirm their fantastic ideas. As a result, the next concept failed miserably, and the scientist, having earned extra money and rested, returned home happy.
Herbert Jankun, PhD in History, for example, was a talented researcher of the Goths and Viking heritage. He charmed Himmler with his theory that the ancestral home of the Goths (the true Aryans, the ancestors of the Germans) was Crimea. As soon as the Germans occupied the peninsula, Yankun went there on an expedition. He did not find a trace of the Goths there. But he plundered the Crimean museums to his best. And when the funding for his research ran out, he applied for admission to intelligence - there salaries and rations were even better.
The scientific significance of the Tibetan expedition was significant - after all, Schaefer, in addition to searching for the Hyperboreans, managed to make many discoveries. Among the birds he brought there were a dozen new species. There were also interesting specimens among insects. Scientists at the Berlin Museum of Natural Sciences are still working with his collection. However, in the early 40s there was no time to deal with his achievements. And in 1945, Schaefer's SS comrades were convicted in Nuremberg. He himself repented for a long time. His career as a scientist was practically broken. He returned to his beloved hunting and ended his days by publishing in magazines for hunters - only there there was room for articles by the famous traveler and zoologist, the first foreigner in the world to receive a "visa" to Tibet.
Victoria Nikiforova